Jonathan Wistow (2022), Social Policy, Political Economy and the Social Contract, Bristol: Policy Press, £24.99, pp. 190, pbk.

demics exploring the literature on this topic: who will find all the main contributions to the debate irrespective of authors’ ideological or theoretical approach to the question. The book will also be useful as a textbook for courses on “Social Europe”, as the structure along nine questions makes for an engaging approach, and each chapter ends with a useful list of further readings and questions for debates or essays. Amandine Crespy has decided not to organize her manuscript chronologically. That has been the right decision, as the current structure gives the book much more analytical power. Still, throughout the book it becomes clear that the current state of the European social question is the result of a number of critical junctures, moments or periods during which the relationship between European integration and social protection could have taken a different course. Besides the ‘original sin’ during the negotiations of the Rome Treaties in the s to allocate market-making and market-correcting policies to different levels of government, these include the neoliberal revolution of the -s, the failure to qualitatively strengthen Social Europe during the heydays of European social democracy in the s before the enlargement of the EU to central and eastern Europe, and the response to the global financial and euro crisis. In the final chapter, Crespy reflects upon the current juncture. How will Brexit, covid- and the climate transition – and today one may add the war in Ukraine – affect the European social question? While in response to these challenges the EU has certainly taken unprecedented decisions at an unprecedented pace, Crespy argues that the EU is still not fit for purpose to tackle the social challenges of the st century. This, she argues, requires that new (social) policy innovations are not just fabricated through technocratic and/or executive politics. Instead, responding to the European social question in an effective, legitimate and sustainable way can only be done by undertaking substantial democratizing steps. But there is little evidence that today, like in the th century, elites are convinced that this is necessary to preserve the system, or that new powerful progressive forces are forming that can extort these changes.